Responsibly raised lamb for the future of localized food and the welfare of the environment.
Our farm story
Ewe know it farms started with a single lamb in 2021, her name was Penny. Lynn had just come home to Ohio from university in Canada during the middle of the pandemic and felt like she needed something to jump back in to farming right away! So she and her boyfriend Jared drove from Ohio to Connecticut to buy a lamb, not just any lamb, but an East Friesian dairy sheep lamb.
In 2023, when Lynn had finally graduated from university, she made the decision to start farming sheep “for realz” and dove in to the process of starting her own farming business. Of course, Lynn wasn’t alone, she was backed by generations of farm experience and to this day still lives and works on her family farm as well (learn more about that in the “about the farmer” section below). So with grant funding secured and pasture on rent, Ewe Know It Farms went from 1 sheep to over 100 in just two weeks.
About the farmer
Hi! My name is Lynn Born, and I like to describe my farm life as my 5-9 after my 9-5. In my day job I work as an accountant in a small family-run tax service. I really enjoy accounting and it is actually what I went to university for(my actual degree is in Management, Economics, and Finance), but farming is my true passion.
How did I figure that out? Short answer: COVID, but the long answer has a few more details than that. I went to the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. No, I did not grow up in Canada, I grew up in Ohio, but I wanted to get an international education because I think it is really important to diversify your life experiences to better understand the world and to be able to form your own goals and sense of self. I absolutely loved going to school at Guelph, I could rave about it for hours, but unfortunately, I was there in the heat of the COVID pandemic including all the lockdowns and border closings. This meant that I could not come home to Ohio even for the weekend for 9 full months (which was an extremely long time for me). During that year I spent most of my time alone doing online courses, learning how to ice skate, going on hikes, and I even composed and recorded an entire album of French Horn music (I almost went to school for music performance but decided business was a more secure route). This left a lot of time for personal reflection and I started thinking about where I wanted to end up in life, what was going to make me happy. At the time I was living in a small dorm room in an environment very opposite of the one I grew up in. At home, I had wide open spaces, so many pets and livestock animals that we were starting to run out of names, and the freedom to cater my environment to my wants and needs. At school, I had a 90-square-foot space and the only living things I interacted with on a daily basis were my house plants. The first time I ever had to buy chicken from the grocery store was when I was 19! Before that chicken came from the yard where we raised them and the freezer (which was always full of some type of meat or another).
This sort of culture shock set me off researching the type of animals I wanted to keep on my homestead (because at this point I was deeply ingrained in the homesteader and gardener side of youtube). I was looking for types of animals and breeds that would fit my idyllic dream of self-sufficiency and easy slow living. I came across dairy sheep and felt like I had hit the jackpot! Triple purpose! Milk, Meat, and Wool!!! So I went on the search for lambs that I could buy in the US and found a small farm in Connecticut where I road-tripped to buy my very first sheep not even a week after I came home for summer break.
Why Sheep?
It seems that no one in my life could possibly fathom WHY I would want to own so many sheep or WHY I want to spend all my free time taking care of them.
To me, it is as simple as “why do you read a book/watch a movie in YOUR free time?” It is something to do, I find it enjoyable, I have fun learning and picking up little things through the process. I have always loved being outside and a lot of my hobbies have revolved around nature and farm life for a long time now. I love gardening and many people could say the same thing about that hobby that they are about my sheep. “Why go to all that trouble when you can buy a tomato at the store for less than a dollar?” I say, why not? Who wouldn’t want 100 fluffy little lambs running at full speed towards you when you bring a bucket of grain in the pasture?
I didn’t get into this trying to make it my full time job, but it also has to financially make sense. I unfortunately don’t have the money to just sink funds into a huge project like this with no return, so lucky for me I am finding a way to make it both profitable and fun. I find it rewarding to see the product of my hard work growing right in front of me. Almost nothing can compare to checking on the sheep in the morning while the air is still misty and the sun is just rising. I feel accomplished when I look out on all these little white puff balls happily grazing away in a natural and beautiful environment. As someone who deeply cares about animal welfare it is immensely fulfilling to help provide these animals with a low stress and overall happy life even though their end destination is somebody’s dinner table. In our culture I really don’t think we can do too much to make people stop eating meat, and especially not me alone, but if I can be the person that makes sure your “meat” had a good life and 200 more lambs per year that end up as food for people were able to breathe fresh air and eat green grass, then that feels to me like I am making the most difference that I can.
Yes, this “hobby” takes up hours of my day every single day. I think about my sheep no less than once an hour. I worry about them, there are difficult days, frustrating moments, and my body hurts sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Fiber arts
In addition to raising market lambs, I also get the blessing of a basically unlimited supply of wool in the spring! It just takes a little bit of work to make that wool usable.
Enjoy this slideshow of some of my fiber arts!
I have been knitting for quite a few years now and just recently started spinning my own yarn. It takes a lot of work to go from shearing the sheep to wearing the finished product, but that is part of the joy of the creative process.
Do you sell wool?
No I do not make it a main business product to sell my sheep’s wool.
There is basically no market for the type of wool that my sheep have. They are mostly Polypay, which IS considered a fine wool breed by some, and the wool I shear off every spring can be sometimes 4 or 5 inches long, so incredibly usable. But there is no one who wants to buy this kind of wool in bulk. The main fiber processing mills in my area have long since closed, and it would often cost more to ship my wool to where it could be processed than what I would make back by selling it.
If you or someone you know is interested in purchasing UNWASHED Polypay fleeces, please click over to my contact page and let me know (especially in February or May as these are two times that I shear my sheep and would easily be able to pick out some nicer, cleaner fleeces for you). I can not spend the time to prepare my fleeces for other people, it is a very time consuming process, but my sheep’s wool would be great for hand spinning, felting, stuffing pillows or plushies, and a variety of other hand made crafts. I certainly have more than enough for my own fiber craft needs so I am plenty willing to share. All my sheep are pure white, have a medium level of lanolin, their wool is medium to fine quality, and usually around a 4 inch staple length.